Amazon.com Guide to Marie-Antoinette

Maxime de la Rocheterie on Marie-Antoinette

"She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr."

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The blurb on the thirty-five cent Ace paperback likens Charles Eric Maine’s 1958 novel World without Men to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’sBrave New World. Ordinarily – and in consideration of the genre and the lurid cover – one would regard such a comparison skeptically. Nevertheless, while not rising to the artistic level of the Orwell and Huxley masterpieces, World without Men merits being rescued from the large catalogue of 1950s paperback throwaways, not least because of Maine’s vision of an ideological dystopia is based on criticism, not of socialism or communism per se nor of technocracy per se, but rather of feminism. Maine saw in the nascent feminism of his day (the immediate postwar period) a dehumanizing and destructive force, tending towards totalitarianism, which had the potential to deform society in radical, unnatural ways. Maine grasped that feminism – the dogmatic delusion that women are morally and intellectually superior to men – derived its fundamental premises from hatred of, not respect for, the natural order; he grasped also that feminism entailed a fantastic rebellion against sexual dimorphism, which therefore also entailed a total rejection of inherited morality.

In World without Men, Maine asserts that the encouragement of sexual hedonism, the spread of pornography into the mainstream of public culture, and the proscription of masculinity are inevitable consequences of the feminist program, once established. The fifty years since the novel’s publication – as a thirty-five cent paperback – have vindicated Maine’s notable prescience as a social commentator.

1 comment:

Two world wars radicalized many a domestic mater victrix. I see it in my own family of origin, and my husbands reaching back to our grandmothers experience of fending for themselves when a whole swathe of men were moved down as cannon fodder - a World without Men was created by men, for men and of men (and women) who have a very warped sense of what conditions are necessary for peace and flourishing. Mid century I've learned the errors of my ways, but you'd be surprised how many disagreements I get into with my mother-in-law (a WWII vet) and my mother (a rationing-baby) about it!

War is evil, that it leaves evil in its wake is hardly surprising. Frenchman Bastiat taught the "broken window fallacy" over a century ago, but too many in the male bastions of society (the law, the financial services industry and the military) still haven't learned that earning a living from destruction is contrary to the natural law! You don't create wealth by breaking things...! We can't flourish as human beings by behaving inhumanely..!

I still call myself a feminist: of the natural law variety, one who defends inate femininity as crucial to the ecology of a "planet parenthood" of souls yearning for the eternal home. Masculinists have a lot to answer for, a dearth of male bodies sitting in church pews on Sundays for example (manly men don't do religion...)

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